Cover Search Winner: Michelle Hercules Walker

The only mirror in Michelle Hercules Walker’s bedroom hangs inside her closet. On October 14, 2014, she took off all her clothes, swung the closet door wide open, and stood in front of her full-length reflection to contemplate pain, literal and figurative. She lifted up her belly to examine a painful red rash that had developed under massive folds of skin. Her doctor had given her an ointment to rub around her middle, but the band of her XXL underwear chafed. Her knees hurt, too. She felt trapped in a loveless marriage.

She weighed 317 pounds at 5'3". The face she examined was a mask of unhappiness. This girl I see is not who I am inside, she thought. I don’t want to be this girl anymore. On that darkest day, she thought about suicide. What was the point of going on like this? Then in the corner of the mirror, Walker noticed the reflection of her two girls playing on her bed, her “beautiful babies,” as she calls them, Maya, now 9, and Moriah, 7, and knew her responsibility to them outweighed her despair. God has spared me this long. I have got to do something to save my life.

Five days later she took those first difficult steps into a nearby gym to meet a personal trainer and runner, James Peronel, whom a friend had recommended. “I was embarrassed, so I chose 7 p.m. because I thought the gym would be empty,” she says. “It was full. Of men.” She told Peronel that she no longer knew who Michelle was, and he replied, “Then we have to find her.” He put her on a treadmill at a speed of 2.0 miles per hour and told her to start walking.

Nothing is more gratifying to my heart than to know that my choice to become healthy and fall in love with running would affect all those looking on," says Michelle Hercules Walker.

Nathan Perkel

Over the coming weeks, Peronel would punch the numbers up to 3.0 and tell her “just jog,” and she would flail her arms and huff and puff. “James is caring but tough,” Walker says. By January she was dialing up the speed herself. Mad about the economic impracticalities of divorcing her husband, she looked down one day to discover she was running—at 5.0. “I could feel my heart in my head beating so fast,” she says. She remembers thinking, Omigod, I’m going to have a heart attack!

Peronel was so pleased with her progress that he signed her up for a 10K in Manhattan in June. By the time she lined up in Central Park, she had lost more than 100 pounds. Peronel thought she could do the race in 1:40. Walker secretly thought she could break 1:30. Nervous about the event, she neglected to eat breakfast. Peronel had told her no matter what happened, she had to run across the finish line. When she approached it, she heard her niece, her daughters, her trainer, all yelling for her. “GO MICHELLE!” She completed the 10K in 1:20:08, and promptly passed out. “I was fine,” she says. “I finished!”

When Walker goes for a run today, she pulls on a pair of black capris, a size L sports bra, and one of a vast collection of stylish sports tops—teal, red, cowlnecked, hooded. “I do love my shirts,” she says. She laces up one of eight pairs of running shoes lying by her front door—New Balance Fresh Foam is her current favorite. She also wears a waist band, a sort of modern-day corset, to take pressure off her back and to hold in the extra skin, one of the consequences of dropping more than 100 pounds in less than a year. She has a black one for running and a lacy one to wear under street clothes. She pulls up her shirt to show off the bruises she gets on her ribcage. The suffering is a small price to pay. “I like to look sexy,” she says.

As a child, Walker was known as the “fat girl,” and by age 13, she’d hit 300 pounds. She was outwardly exuberant, impressing teachers with her vocal skills at New York City’s prestigious High School of Performing Arts. But inwardly she was struggling, and a depressive episode in her late teens landed her in a psych wing at Kings County Hospital. She tried Prozac, she talked to therapists—nothing made her feel good. She soothed herself with food. “Food was my best friend,” she says. “All I did was eat, sleep, eat, sleep. Food was my life.” It would remain so for the next two decades.

By age 45, Walker had to rock back and forth to get up off the couch. Or call her girls to come pull her up by her arms. Or scoot down to one end of the couch, put both hands on the arm rest, maneuver her feet to the floor, and press her body up. As a phlebotomist who makes house calls to draw blood, she could barely climb the stairs to patients’ apartments. Her knees groaned. “You know how many diets I tried?” she says. “Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, you name it. I’d lose weight and then gain it all back and then some.”

Her sister had gastric bypass surgery, and Walker briefly considered it. Instead, with Peronel’s help (or demands) she cut portion sizes, traded soda and juice for infused water, gave up fried fish sandwiches for veggie burgers. “We looked at a photo of Michelle in January and said, ‘Who’s that?’” Peronel says. “I told her, ‘It’s the new you!’”

It’s still hard for her to reconcile. When Walker found out she was one of the finalists in the RW Cover Search, she says, “I was like, ‘Lord, are you joking with me?’” She posted the happy news on Facebook and says her Messenger inbox was flooded with people she didn’t even know congratulating her, asking her how she lost weight. A half-brother from her dad’s side whom she’s never met reached out to her and said, “I’m so proud of you.”

Walker aims to run at least four times a week, a minimum of an hour at a time. Sometimes she goes to the gym to work out with Peronel and hit the treadmill. Other times she jogs to Canarsie Park, one block from her home, to run up to six miles around the paved path. Always she gets looks and comments about her changing body. A true evangelist, she is happy to preach the gospel of running. “Running helped me be a better person not just for myself, not just for my daughters, but for all those people who are struggling with feeling unworthy,” she says. “I want people to look at me and realize this can be done.”

Exactly one year after that life-changing day last October, all is bright in Brooklyn. Golden autumn light bathes the sidewalk outside Walker’s neat red-brick rowhouse. Her sister and 16-year-old nephew live on the first floor; Walker and her two daughters live on the top. She can run up the stairs now without having to sit down to catch her breath.

Inside, the home is undergoing the same kind of happy makeover as Walker has herself. Gifts from loving friends and family are everywhere—expressions of their pride in her hard work: Four brown leatherette chairs sit neatly packed in one corner of the kitchen, waiting for a matching table to arrive; Netflix and Hulu await her girls on the flat-screen; there’s a new living room suite. The living room floors have been stripped and are being refinished by a friend she met in the past year of discovery. Near a front window stands a shoe rack filled with girls’ boots and sneakers. Walker’s running shoes are scattered near the front door. She and her husband have agreed to separate, though he still lives in the house while they negotiate the postmarital finances. (“He just sleeps here,” she says. “We never interact.”)

Walker and Peronel’s relationship is, she says, complex: intense, intimate, sometimes contentious. They talk every day. But it is not romantic. “I’m his ‘Biggest Loser,’” she says. “I’m a walking advertisement. He’s gotten at least 12 clients because of me.”

In her bedroom, next to her neatly made queen-size bed, is a child’s wooden chair that she used to have to stand on to climb into bed. Now it holds an iPad and a copy of Runner’s World. The full-length mirror on the closet door is harder to peer into because the door’s swing is blocked by one of four big piles of clothes on the floor. “They don’t fit me anymore!” she says. “I’m giving away a lot of clothes.” She shows off a favorite new purchase—a pair of size 12 dark wash Gap jeans. “I can almost fit in size 10, but I don’t want my stomach hanging over the top, no.”

“I try to smile every day,” Walker says. “Before, I smiled here”—she puts her hands up to her face and forces it up in a smiling grimace. “Now, I smile from here,” she says, placing her hand over her heart.

Walker smiles at her reflection. “Now I like her,” she says, and taps the mirror. “She’s beautiful.”

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